Daily Archives: May 30, 2015

Eataly in Downtown Chicago Should Be Your New Italian Grocery Store After hours browsing the Thorne miniatures and the paintings, sculptures, and pottery at the Art Institute of Chicago, we were hungry. Jimmy wanted us to see a grocery store he thought we’d love called Eataly. He was right. This place is everything a grocery store…

Remember back in 2012 when Jimmy came on one of his regular house guest trips to visit Aaron and me in Kansas City? The time when we went to the Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art? Today, he took us to the Art Institute of Chicago. You already experienced the incredible Thorne miniatures installment in another post,…

Narcissa Niblack Thorne was born in 1882. She fell in love with her childhood sweetheart, James Ward, and they married. He was the heir to the Montgomery Ward fortune, one of the biggest in the world at the time thanks to a chain of department stores that were once as ubiquitous as Target or J.C. Penney. A graduate of art school, the Chicago socialite wasn’t content to sit around and make small talk all of her life. She began designing and orchestrating these incredible one-foot-to-one-inch scale historical replicas of different architectural, interior design, and furniture styles throughout history to serve as models of how homes and spaces had changed over the years. She was meticulous and insisted upon accuracy (e.g., the wood, down to the grain direction, of the tiny furniture had to be made in exactly the same way as the model piece upon which it was based.)